Who “Owns” Social Media in an Organization?
The Driving Force:
I love learning through other people – reading blogs, hearing about experiences and collaborating on projects. Since social media is an arena that individuals and businesses are “figuring out” daily, I thought it would be interesting, not to mention extremely informative, to hear from some of the people that consistently provide beguiling insight in the social media realm.
These “panelists” were kind enough to make time in their busy schedules to answer several questions that I posed.
The Participants:
Chris Brogan is President of New Marketing Labsand the co-founder of PodCamp new media conference series. He is a speaker, blogger, and writer. His blog has been ranked in the Top 10 of the Advertising Age Power 150 Blogs. He is also the co-author Trust Agents.
Jason Falls is the founder of Social Media Explorer. A social media educator, strategist, public relations professional and blogger, he helps companies understand the social web and shows them how engaging consumers online can help their businesses. His blog also ranks in the Top 20 of the Advertising Age Power 150 Blogs.
Rob Hahn is the founder and managing partner of 7DS Associates – a marketing, strategy, and technology consulting firm specializing in creative solutions rooted in strategic analysis. He is also a respected marketing, technology and real estate blogger and brings a unique perspectives on social media based on his unique background.
Charlene Li, founder of Altimeter Group and co-author of Groundswell, is a graduate of Harvard Business School and was recently named as one of The Most Influential Women in Technology by Fast Company. She has also made appearances on 60 Minutes, CNN and CNBC.
Scott Monty, Global Digital & Multimedia Communications Manager for Ford Motor Company, is the strategic advisor for all organization-wide social media activities. A marketing and communications professional, he possesses experience in health care, biotech and automotive industries, working with a wide range of clients.
David Meerman Scott is the BusinessWeek bestselling author of The New Rules of Marketing & PR , which has been published in 24 languages. He is also the author World Wide Rave. David has presented at hundreds of conferences and seminars in over 20 countries on four continents.
The Conversation: Part One
Do you think one particular team must take ownership of social media within an organization, i.e. marketing, pr, web team, etc.?
Chris: No. Social media is like a phone. Everyone should have one. What you DO with it is what differentiates.
Jason: As I wrote and have indicated before, I think public relations is the department that should take responsibility for an organization’s social media. There are a number of reasons, but Kami Huyse summed it up nicely by saying, “Public Relations is great at building and maintaining relationships, as well as creating informational content.” Social media is about building and maintaining relationships and providing customers with content in its many forms.
Keep in mind, I say “take responsibility” instead of “take ownership.” Everyone in the organization owns a piece of it. Social media isn’t something that can be silo-ed off in one department. It is most effectively implemented across the enterprise with everyone taking ownership to a degree. Public relations should be responsible for training and implementing social media best practices, providing content and keeping track of/managing the relationships both internally and externally.
Rob: The only team that can and must take ownership is the Senior Leadership Team, specifically the CEO. The reason is that “social media” to me is just the application of Cluetrain principles, and Cluetrain is such a fundamental cultural and organizational change that only the CEO can drive that kind of change.
If some team underneath takes ownership of social media, it becomes ghettoized into being just a “new communications channel” or an “interactive marketing technique” or some such and not much changes. Businesses who are doing that are just hoping that social media obeys the old paradigms of one-to-many communications rather than human-to-human relationships and conversations.
Charlene: It may start as one team because that team has something very specific to gain from participating. But there should be a plan in place on how to “spread” the engagement so that it becomes something that the entire organization does, rather than concentrated in one place. The more inclusive you can make it, the better.
Scott: If you’re a big brand, it’s not possible without Senior leadership in place. I couldn’t do what I do without the support of my VP of Communications or CEO. They understand it is important.
David: I think the right people to take ownership are those who are passionate. This is not just “marketing as usual.” You don’t just toss brochure copy out onto a blog. So it takes people and an organization with passion and who are genuinely excited about creating information online.
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Where do you think social media “belongs” in an organization? Should one division/department maintain complete “control” or take ownership of social media initiatives?
I look forward to hearing thoughts and opinions on this topic!
Tags: charlene li, chris brogan, company structure, david meerman scott, jason falls, Ownership, rob hahn, scott monty
Communications, Discussions & Interviews, Marketing, Public Relations, Social Media | Rachel Rusnak August 26, 2009
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By Mike Frichol, August 26, 2009 @ 6:00 pm
I agree with Chris that social media is like a phone and everyone in a company should use it. Just like phone systems are managed as a utility for all by the IT group, social media should be managed by the Marketing group who would provide usage guidelines, training, monitoring and management as a company-wide utility. Social media is primarily about customer engagement and conversations – that should be a marketing responsibility.
By Joseph Kingsbury, August 26, 2009 @ 6:39 pm
Social media won’t be owned by a single group. PR is a natural fit right now because relationship building is core to social media but the impact on various functions within the organization are/will be too big for one discipline to own. That includes sales, marketing, product development, customer service, IR, etc. This is both a threat and a major opportunity for PR to evolve as a facilitating function in the corporation.
Joseph Kingsbury, Text 100
By Martin Walsh, August 26, 2009 @ 7:24 pm
Interesting perspectives but it would have been great to get deeper perspectives from everyone!
I am the former head of Digital Marketing for Microsoft and I’d like to provide my two cents because this is a passionate subject for me.
I am someone who was tasked with defining, developing strategy, developing capability (including training, infrastructure and operationalisation – playbooks, workflows, policies, guidelines etc) and executing digital marketing and social influence marketing at both the local and global level.
Any great customer centric organisation should have sales, customer service, channels, product development and PR etc as part of their marketing unit. If they don’t, then they are not taking full advantage of the critical changes in consumer behaviour and more importantly fundamental marketing and customer experience best practices.
As I have been evangelising for the past 3-4 years, we have moved from a marketing era of ‘Information asymmetry’ to ‘Information Democracy’. Marketing used to be command and control and it was largely a monologue being broadcast through monologue style channels like TV, print, radio etc. Today, Marketing is a Dialogue and the best marketers (and companies) are those who are the best listeners. More of my insights at http://www.slideshare.com/martinwalsh
As such, social influence marketing should be led by the marketing function with very strong collaboration and engagement with the other functions. In most cases this can (or should) be led by the digital marketing executive as social influence marketing (SIM) is interdependent with all aspects of online channels from SEO to SEA, websites (on and off network), online analytics, online reputation management, online channel experience (ecommerce, video, podcasting, community, usability, design, chat, click to call etc), social CRM and more. It then requires very strong collaboration with the other marketing disciplines such as PR, customer service, sales, advertising, direct response, product development etc.
I will give you a small example; Online Reputation Management / Digital PR touches digital related infrastructure and capability such as your social media newsroom, SEO/SEA, analytics, social media monitoring, social CRM and your own websites & external websites to name a few. It is critical that not only is there a strategy in place for how this ties in with the overall marketing plan but importantly you have the right analytics skills, dashboards / reports, workflow between PR, management, online producers & marketers, the right social media monitoring & engagement tools and on and on.
Many cutting edge organisations have even gone further and completely redesigned their marketing function to put social media / social influence marketing at their core of customer / audience engagement and marketing and disciplines like advertising are now seen purely as a contact strategy. Dell & Ducati are great examples.
My view is initially it should be centralised to ramp up capability, learning and experience but in parallel this same team would also be charge with training and strongly influencing the traditional marketing, sales, customer service & product development units. Can you imagine an organisation trying to get ahead of the curve with digital marketing and social media / social influence marketing by just doing training programs and brining in outside ‘consultants’? It would take years and my own experience is that when push comes to shove around time and budget, marketers and agencies fall back to what they know and are comfortable with. In addition, there is a very poor understanding and expertise around online measurement and analytics and therefore you need people who have this as part of their DNA every day. As the skills, experience and discipline becomes more ingrained you can then decentralise some of the centralised capability but this will depend on whether you organisation is truly customer centric vs being product or business unit centric. An added benefit for us was that our centralised team crossed product unit boundaries and was aligned by audience so we got a dual benefit.
In my role I provided a very strong leadership, evangelising and visionary function, helping management, marketers and agencies to first understand the behavioural and environmental issues which changed the marketing fundamentals (and also that it wasn’t a fad). I then helped defined what it meant to Microsoft, developed strategy frameworks to put it into practical context, then developed training programs, brought in centralised talent to expedite capability, operationalized the capability across my teams and the other disciplines, marketers and agencies and then helped to develop campaigns and execute them.
So, the answer to the question is that for any social media / social influence marketing and digital marketing capability succeed you MUST have support from the senior leadership team (remember the relinquish control axiom) or any effort will likely fail. But, importantly you MUST have a person who understands the entire digital and traditional marketing spectrum and disciplines be responsible for leading the development of strategy, development of capability (infrastructure & talent) and the execution of social media / social influence marketing because it is interdependent with all of the other digital marketing capabilities, not mutually exclusive.
Regards,
Martin
By David B. Thomas, August 26, 2009 @ 7:30 pm
My feelings are pretty closely aligned with Jason’s, not surprising since I came from the PR team before taking on the title Social Media Manager. I also agree with David that you need passionate engagement for anything to happen.
Top-down support is essential, but I think for many organizations, getting the CEO to lead the efforts, while a worthwhile goal, isn’t always going to be realistic.
Chris and I agree completely in principle, but I think at the beginning stages a company may well need someone to help drive social media policies, strategies, training and engagement. That’s what I do and why my title is Social Media Manager, although I’ve known since the start that in somewhere between six and 24 months, that’s going to sound kind of silly.
But I’ll be out of business cards by then.
By Rachel Rusnak, August 27, 2009 @ 1:57 pm
Great insights – thanks for the contributions. I definitely agree that a top-down support system is imperative!
The idea that the people most passionate about social media would “take ownership” seems like it would be a natural step, but at the same time, I believe (and agree with Mike) that there must be guidelines in place for organization-wide efforts. Going a step further, there also must be a grounded strategy in place as well, i.e. why are we blogging, what is our goal in tweeting, what do we hope to contribute and achieve through our social media efforts, how will this help our business and the consumers/clients we serve.
Again, great to hear other opinions and takes on this topic!